Introduction to black hole entropy and supersymmetry

Abstract

In these lectures we introduce some of the principles and techniques that are relevant for the determination of the entropy of extremal black holes by either string theory or supergravity. We consider such black holes with N=2 and N=4 supersymmetry, explaining how agreement is obtained for both the terms that are leading and those that are subleading in the limit of large charges. We discuss the relevance of these results in the context of the more recent developments.